Neural correlates of intentional and incidental recognition of famous faces.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to study the relationship between intentional and incidental recognition of famous faces. Intentional and incidental recognition were operationally defined as repeated presentations of targets and nontargets within a modified Sternberg task. These repetitions elicited temporally and topographically distinct ERP modulations. A repetition effect around 300 ms (ERE/N250r) and a preceding modulation did not differ between intentional and incidental recognition, whereas a following repetition effect (LRE/N400) around 500 ms showed differences between incidental and intentional recognition. These results show that during the first few hundred milliseconds intentional and incidental face recognition relate to similar processing, indicating that familiar faces are recognized even when their identification is not required.